The lull that characterized the holiday period continued into the past weekend. News flow is likely to pick up pace after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday scheduled for Jan. 16, as the curtains lift on the fourth-quarter reporting season.
Here's a recap of a few major headlines that hit the wire over the weekend:
1. Goldman Sachs Latest To Join Job Cut Bandwagon? Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS is reportedly looking to cut 3,200 jobs this week, with much of the eliminations planned in the trading and banking units. The scale of the rumored job cuts is the biggest since the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed.
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2. Turmoil In Brazil As Protestors Storm Govt. Buildings: A week after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was inaugurated as president following a runoff election, former President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the Brazilian Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Court in the country’s capital Brasilia, according to media reports. The president, who was away from the capital during the protests, called the protestors “fanatic fascists.” The unfortunate development in Brazil is a sort of deja vu, rekindling unsavory memories of what happened in the U.S. on Jan. 6, 2020, after former President Donald Trump lost the presidential election.
3. Jack Ma Giving Up Controlling Interest In Ant: Ant Financial, a sister company of Jack Ma co-founded Alibaba Group Holding Limited BABA, said the billionaire, who has been away from the public gaze for a while now, will give up his controlling stake in the fintech company. This is seen as a move to appease Chinese regulators and remove the hurdles for Ant’s public listing.
4. Apple Makes A Trade-Off: Tech giant Apple Inc. AAPL is planning to unveil its much-awaited mixed reality headset in spring and potentially begin shipments in the fall, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said in his weekly “Power On” newsletter. The focus on the MR headset would mean the company will likely give up on innovating its existing lineup of products.
5. Summers Harps On Wage Inflation: Inflation cannot be brought down to the Fed’s target of 2% without substantially lowering wage inflation, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said in an interview with Bloomberg. The prospects of a recession in the winter or spring of 2023 were “certainly lower” right now, he added.
What Else? Nine S&P 500 companies, including two Dow 30 components, are scheduled to report their December quarter earnings this week. The profit of S&P 500 companies is expected to slip in the fourth quarter for the first time since the third quarter of 2020, financial data provider FactSet reported.
While analysts lauded Tesla Inc.’s TSLA last week’s price cuts in China as a smart move to arrest the market share slide, the move triggered an unintended reaction. Hundreds of customers, who recently bought a Tesla vehicle ahead of the price cuts, thronged delivery and service centers of Tesla China to express their grievance over the suddenness of the move and a lack of explanation from the company.
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